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GHETTO BLASTING: ON LOÏC WACQUANT’S URBAN OUTCASTS1

Tom Slater2 Institute of Geography, School of Geosciences University of Edinburgh United Kingdom

Abstract: This commentary reviews Loïc Wacquant’s Urban Outcasts and amplifies and extends his argument that ghettos are not forming in European cities by focusing on a public debate on ethnic segregation that took place in Britain in the autumn of 2005. It uses the example of St. Paul’s, Bristol, to argue that urban marginality has indeed led to the formation of what Wacquant terms “anti-ghettos”—multi-ethnic areas deeply penetrated by the state. The commentary also considers the role of intellectuals in reinforcing and aggravating the “folk concepts” that enter the realm of urban policy with detrimental consequences, and argues that policy critique is preferable to “policy-relevant” urban scholarship. [Key words: ghettoization, cité, banlieue, anti-ghettos, ghetto blasting, Great Britain, folk concepts.]

Students can be tough critics, but sometimes their collective reaction is a good measure of the importance and quality of scholarship. I first became aware of the power of Loïc Wacquant’s writing in 2004, when I started using some of his articles to teach undergraduates about some deeply problematic transformations of urban society in the U.S. and in Europe—precisely those transformations that are now so vividly captured and packaged in Urban Outcasts. I will never forget the excited reactions of many far-from-excitable students after we had discussed in class a typically pugnacious essay Wacquant published in 1997, entitled “Three Pernicious Premises in the Study of the American Ghetto” (Wacquant, 1997).3 A couple of years later, I fed some more Wacquant to another round of undergraduates; when I invited him to give a public lecture at the University of Bristol in 2006, I was stunned to see the back third of the lecture hall packed with these students, voluntarily attending an event outside their usual class time. This is clearly a scholar with something special to offer. In welcoming Urban Outcasts, I have two objectives. First, I wish to amplify and extend the argument that ghettoization is not occurring in European cities by focusing on a public debate on ethnic segregation that took place in Britain in 2005. Second, and by way of sympathetic critique, I want to focus a little more on something that only gets tantalizing

1 This article is part of a review symposium on Loïc Wacquant’s Urban Outcasts: A Comparative Sociology of Advanced Marginality. 2 Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Tom Slater, Institute of Geography, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street, Edinburgh EH8 9XP, United Kingdom; telephone: +44(0)-131-650-9506; fax: +44(0)-131-650-2524; email: tom.slater@ed.ac.uk 3 This is a wonderfully exciting piece of writing; for me, right up there with the very best interventions ever made in urban scholarship. One particularly astute student came up to me after our discussion of it and said, “Damn! Why can’t more academics write stuff like this?”